True to the Roots

by Monte Dutton

  Before the concert begins, I overhear conversations, sitting alone with my notepad.

  "I never wanted to meet Dylan, man, you know what I mean. I used to be with the Grateful Dead all the time. I've seen Dylan, but I never wanted to meet him."

  The woman who introduces Russell calls him the finest singer-songwriter in the country, after which he and Hardin arrive onstage and lend considerable credence to her contention.

  "I love the West," Russell tells the audience, "but want to tell it from my own standpoint, without politics and false romance. This country was founded by rugged individuals who came over here to escape oppression and starvation and ended up going insane in the wilder reaches of this country.

  "Most families lost their pioneer spirit. It was bred out of them in three centuries. They caved in. Why do we now live in a land of McDonald's and Wal-Marts? Fear. Plain and simple. Fear. You can only find traces of that old lost America in Alaska. Check out country music in the last fifteen years. Wal-Mart emotions . . . Everything we came here to escape . . . has caught up with us."

  Along with other artists like Ian Tyson and Don Edwards, Russell strives to keep alive not just the dying virtues of the West but also the adventurous soul of the human condition.

  Russell tells the Freight and Salvage audience that the aching remnants of lost love have triggered many of the new songs: "It Goes Away," "Kansas City Violin," "All the Fine Young Ladies," "Ash Wednesday," and "Stealing Electricity." His latest studio album, Indians Cowboys Horses Dogs (Hight-one), is made up of his own western ballads, however, as well as standards like Marty Robbins's "El Paso" and Bob Dylan's "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts."

  He has just returned from Europe, where he says he recovered from emotional anguish and "began to think more clearly."

  "I'm tired of being 'Mr. Entertainment' onstage," he says. "I'll leave that to Siegfried and Roy. Eventually, the tiger's going to grab you by the neck.

  "That gig is finished. I want to sing these new songs and record a double record about love and fear . . . I've been edging more and more toward the personal. Like Carl Perkins said, 'If you run away long enough, you'll run back into yourself.'"

  Russell pokes fun at the new direction of his music. He imagines himself as a member of the audience and asks: "What's up with this? What happened to the funny guy?

  "He went into the Rhine with a lot of cowboy songs."

  Russell's passion matches Steve Earle's as he rails against restrictions on free speech: "Colin Powell's son is the head of the fcc [at the time]. You can't say 'piss' anymore, let alone 'fuck.' Forget the rest. The problem with political correctness is it's boring."

  The humor is biting but insightful. At one point he says of the stories in his songs, "They're all true, folks, right up to the point where they don't rhyme."

  Russell talks about drying out in Europe and notes that the coffeehouse doesn't serve booze. He affects an Irish dialect and yells to the back of the room, "I'll sing no more, Nicki, till I get an oatmeal raisin cookie."

  Then he chats briefly with a woman in the first row, after which he says, "This [next song] is for Carmen. With a name like that, you're bound for the big-time."

  A smattering of the crowd is leaving as Russell returns to the stage for an encore. With a smile on his face he yells to those who are departing, "The rest of you bastards, get the hell out of here!" In the middle of the encore set, he abruptly yells: "You can't request a song! You work here. Shut off the cash register, you capitalist!"

  I show up at Down Home Records, hoping to conduct the interview I wasn't able to do at the coffeehouse. Russell and I chat amiably, but he asks me to send him a list of questions by e-mail. That way, he says, he can compose a thoughtful reply. I've read stories suggesting that he's felt burned by journalists in the past.

  Any doubts I have about using such a mechanism for an interview are dispelled by the replies I get from Russell within days. The thoughtfulness reflected in his songs is prevalent, along with a healthy quotient of bluntness.

  I ask him about his love for the West and the songs he's written about it.

  "No agendas," he replies. "I love the old songs and melodies, but all of that has been covered long ago and very well by good people like Tex Ritter and Marty Robbins and Johnny Cash and Peter LaFarge. Current western music, with the exception of Ian Tyson, the singing of Don Edwards, and the poetry of Zarzyski, is beat. Dead. Square. Conservative. Serving up the old bullshit 'Myth of the West.'

  "Most cowboy singers wouldn't say 'horse shit' if they had a mouth full of it (to quote my friend Katy Lee). I love telling hard, well-carved stories from a believable scenario or a wounded heart. I love the West but want to tell it from my own standpoint, without politics and false romance. Hell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott was singing 'The Range of the Buffalo' on the streets of Paris in 1959. How do you follow that?"

  I note that the history of the West is a metaphor for the modern conflict between rugged individualism and the strictures of society and ask him how he draws the line in his own mind.

  "Check out country music in the last fifteen years. Wal-Mart emotions. The dead fucking the dead . . . in a vacuum. To quote the bard [Charles] Bukowski, 'Everything we came here to escape . . . has caught up with us.'"

  Noting that he has cowritten with Ian Tyson, Nanci Griffith, and Dave Alvin, among others, I ask him about how songwriters work together and wonder if egos get in the way.

  He answers yes. "Egos always get in the way. Ego is a big old ape sitting up on our backs. Cowriting really works in factory environments like Nashville or the old Tin Pan Alley. You compromise the heart out of the song. It's like two people trying to paint a picture together. It's inherently tough because you show up with your own creative baggage. That being said, I've learned a lot from these people because they come from diverse melodic backgrounds, so you bite the bullet a bit, and maybe you luck out on a few.

  "Remember, Lennon and McCartney did not actually sit down and write those songs together; they wrote alone. In the end it's one soul talking to whatever muse or angel graces you with their spirit, but there have been exceptional moments of collaboration. On occasion. It's tough going."

  Specifically, I ask him about a line in one of his songs that offers the view that withholding affection from loved ones is "the oldest trick we know."

  What is there, I wonder, about the human condition that makes us increasingly standoffish and secretive in dealing with one another? Is honest emotion in decline?

  "Yes," Russell replies, "honest emotion is in decline. Or gone dead. I'm glad you picked up on that line about 'withholding affection.'

  "I just broke up with a lovely woman. The song you are quoting is about her, and we had agreed that if we ever broke up, we would be friends forever. Well, that didn't happen, pard, and it seldom does. So, it hurt. Plenty. I had to work with this person in a very close situation a few months ago, and she kept her nose up in the air. She refused any closure. I thought it was a brutal move. Maybe I deserved it, and it certainly opened my eyes. Well, a month or so later, I'm in a [bed and breakfast] in Northern Ireland, and there's a beautiful woman owner who is breaking up with her boyfriend, and we get to talking about life and love.

  "Well the Irish lass ladled a few truths on me: 'Women have an on-off button on their emotions. When it's turned off . . . it's turned off. That's it.'

  "And here's the capper: 'For women, withholding our affection is really the only leverage we have!'

  "Well, I was stunned when I heard that. Like, I have been walking around in a dream for fifty years! Fighting James Thurber's 'War between Men and Women,' but with inferior weapons. Withholding affection, when you know it hurts someone who may need healing, is a very brutal move. Ach-tung! Be aware. There are land mines on the road to the soul.

  "The old campaigner still has a lot to learn about love, but this recent situation has triggered many new songs like 'It Goes Away,' 'Kansas City Violin,' 'All the Fine Young Ladies,' 'Ash We
dnesday,' and 'Stealing Electricity.'

  "So, I'm blessed to be able to sober up from this heartache [three breakups in five years] and learn something that I may be able to share in my art. I hope so. Then there was this Zen nun who really clued me in to love, but that's another story, as they say. 'We go to the father of souls . . . but it is necessary to pass by the dragons.' St. Augustine, I believe."

  When I ask Russell about the "funny guy went into the Rhine" line, he replies: "I started out in strip clubs and topless bars, being the master of ceremonies, and I did it well, like Joel Grey in [the movie] Cabaret. That gig is finished. I want to sing these new songs and record a double record about love and fear, so I threw the dummy off the bridge. He was the wise-ass making rude remarks to chicks and saying 'fuck' onstage, and I was the one being blamed. But the parasites are hard to get rid of, and, yes, you gain much-needed perspective playing to foreign audiences. They listen on a deeper level, and they are not victim to the cloud of current American hype. They have sunk their own cross into the heart of the vampire."

  Speaking of America, I ask Russell about the growing trend toward consolidation of the music and radio industries, comparing it to a system of legalized payola.

  "The American public has allowed itself to be fucked in the ass for at least twenty years," Russell replies. "Country music is dead, offensive. Wal-Mart mentality has taken over. The whole country looks the same as you drive through it. The same repetition of chain outlets. Yeah, it's depressing. It's way beyond depressing. Things like wars in the Middle East are a distraction from the cancer here at home that has eaten this country alive. A spiritual cancer—a giving in to the inevitability of three or four corporations telling us where to eat and shit and what to listen to.

  "I want to write about it. It's my only way out. That will be the fear portion of the next record. Available wherever independent darkness is sold. Not available in shops.

  "All my friends say they don't eat at McDonald's or shop at Wal-Marts or listen to modern country music, but someone is buying all this crap. Aliens. We have to be able to identify them and close down their golf courses because that's where they breed, like mutant sociopathic lemmings.

  "They kicked the living legends off the radio fifteen years ago—Cash, Haggard, and Jones—and proceeded to turn the scene into the Night of the Living Dead. I did pick up a CD from a great writer, though, Gretchen Peters. Halcyon. It's commercial, but it's great. Maybe there's a slight ray of hope.

  "I'm tired of trashing Nashville; it's neither here nor there in my life. If you want to get an impression of what happened, go find the top ten Billboard country songs for the last forty years. You'll find you might recognize all of them from 1955 to '75. Then, after that, it goes rotten. Then nothing. Death. People down there walk around in dead people's clothes. They smell of fear. It's a spiritual golf course. Miniature golf. Austin is getting to be the same way. South by Southwest [an annual music festival held in Austin] was conjured up by motel owners. Young writers ought to stay home and get a job in a bar, learn twenty Hank Williams songs, and get their hearts broken raw a few dozen times. Bleed a little then write with the blood. Yeah, that sounds very colorful, but there's truth there. Dylan knew two thousand old folk songs before he wrote his own and then rode into Greenwich Village on a donkey, exploding American music. There are good people camped out in Nashville: Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Gretchen Peters . . . but they have nothing to do with the industry, the Death Factory. Most current songwriters have nothing to say, but that doesn't hold them back. They buy a rhyming dictionary and start lying."

  I broach the subject of something Russell had said to the audience in Berkeley: "Keep away from Tom. You'll wind up in a song."

  "I'm tired of being a journalist or a novelist in song," he replies. "There are Gnostic principles operative: 'Everything you bring forth will save you; everything you do not bring forth will destroy you.' That's from the Gospel of St. Thomas, the one they tore out of the edited Bible and buried in a cave. Dig it."

  I ask if it disappoints him that so much modern music, like everything else, is as concerned about political correctness as it seems to be.

  "Hell, yes," Russell replies. "From both the Right and the Left and the middle. I had a writer from the Telegraph-Tribune in England at my house a few months ago. He said America is turning into a boring shithole because of political correctness. Of course, this guy smoked and drank and liked to fuck stray women. Or pretend he did. That stuff went out fifteen years ago. It's more conservative now than it was when they hung Lenny Bruce. Catholics and Jews and all of us whining about morality, while people are destroying each other in the Middle East and the Catholic Church is spending millions of dollars to settle beefs with their pedophile priests . . . and the fcc is coming down hard on words like piss and shit. We're all going to be living in caves, duct-taped to chairs, [and] force-fed Christian rock music. Go back and read George Orwell. The dead walk among us, and their taste in art is all fucked-up."

  My last question for Russell is: "One man's team player is another's ass-kissing weasel—where do you draw the line?"

  "That's one question too many," he writes back. "You draw the line . . . I know where I stand. Adios and good luck with your book. Good questions. I applaud you and was glad to meet up."

  Ain't No Place for No Poor Boy like Me

  Las Vegas, Nevada I December 2004

  Under normal circumstances Vegas would be the last place I'd go to work on a book about country music or, for that matter, even just to see the place. This, however, isn't a normal circumstance.

  For ten days each December the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association sanctions the National Finals Rodeo at Thomas & Mack Arena. The rodeo brings hundreds of cowboys and thousands of their fans to Sin City. They take over the city. The streets and casinos are full of people wearing cowboy boots and Stetsons. Where rodeo fans migrate, country music acts follow. I fly to Vegas to observe the whole scene, but the specific goal in mind is Brad Paisley, about whom I harbor profoundly mixed feelings.

  When country becomes cool, it also becomes insipid, at least to its discerning fans. The brief wave of popularity that followed the movie Urban Cowboy sent the music reeling in the early 1980s. The specter of John Travolta, of Saturday Night Fever fame, getting caught up in "hardhat days and honky tonk nights" fueled a depressing trendiness that made mechanical bulls popular and Johnny Cash passé. Thankfully, what followed was a rise of the so-called New Traditional sound of singers like Ricky Skaggs and Randy Travis.

  Garth Brooks and the feeding frenzy that followed his fame sent the music down the drain again. Brooks won over millions of fans by crafting a sound that was more intricate than traditional country and a performance style that borrowed liberally from what had been associated with rock 'n' roll. It wasn't that Brooks harmed the music so much. What robbed it of its message, not to mention its integrity and soulfulness, were the imitators who followed Brooks and the formula for success that the recording industry implemented in his name.

  Once again, country music is in need of emotional rescue. The common theme of most songs these days seems to be "Hey, baby, let's party." Take away Alan Jackson's remakes of revered country classics and George Strait's agreeable cowboy persona, and there's not much country left. The music has become bereft of the populism embodied in Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, George Jones, and dozens of others.

  Which is why Paisley seems so important to me, and when I contacted his management, exchanged some e-mails, and received word that the artist could spare me fifteen minutes or so if I'd meet him in Vegas, where he and Pat Green were playing back-to-back, late-night shows at the Hilton, I booked a flight the next morning.

  All I needed to do, it seems, was schedule an appropriate time with Brent Long, Paisley's road manager. My first telephone conversation was promising because Long and I had a mutual friend, he seemed to be familiar with my name and reputation, and my explanation of why I wanted to interview P
aisley seemed to satisfy him. What I didn't know when I left South Carolina was that the rodeo, not Paisley, would be the most insightful aspect of the trip.

  For four days I'm on call. I might as well be a general practitioner with emergency room duty. Long tells me to call him. When I do, he exhaustively confronts me with all the demands on the artist's time, tells me he's working hard to "work me in," and gives me another time to call him. I tell him any time will do. The only discouraging aspect of our conversations—mainly they're a few mild assertions by me and breathless recitations by Long—is the road manager's concern that I'm going to get Paisley in trouble with radio stations. He tells me that Paisley had participated in a call-in show on a radio station—in Michigan, as I recall—in which a questioner complained about the lack of a mechanism to make call-in requests of favorite songs. Paisley had mildly expressed his view that listeners should be able to request tunes on country stations, and this had been enough to make a station manager, one who apparently considered himself to be some sort of visionary leader in the field of centrally devised playlists, to, in Long's words, go berserk.

  I tell Long that my chief motivation in interviewing Paisley is to depict his career positively, but that little exchange marks the first time I get a sinking feeling. The fact that I've traveled almost all the way across the continental United States for this interview does not seem to impress him much, although I mention it in passing several times.

  Returning another message, Long tells me that he's got me on the pass list for the Friday night show, but he doesn't think I'm going to be able to talk to Paisley, what with all the "meet-and-greets" and the litany of short interviews scheduled with various radio stations. I remind him that I'm writing a book, not a five-paragraph profile for My Weekly Reader, but I try to be patient and ask him if Saturday night will be better. He says he thinks he can get me fifteen minutes "tops" on Saturday, so I say great, how about leaving the pass for the Saturday night show. Super.